Sometimes even on the dropship I know someone’s not going to do well. I don’t try to kick them I pick them up if they fall down. I call it teamwork lol
Recently two guys que for damnation at teenage level. Raised eyebrow but it turned out they where both total chads and didn’t go down once easy game.
Was glad I didn’t mention it 
I’ve got good enough to make up for people having a bad game or a dodgy loadout now and I enjoy doing that just as much as the game’s where you destroy everything.
The problem is it’s not just that one guy who AFK’ed, it seems the vast majority of Shieldgryns, >80% spend a LOT of time turtling. I think they all read those regurgitated and recirculated internet “gaming” articles and play accordingly; a long post-game convo w/ one dude pointed me to this.
I’ve even had to bring it up, repeatedly, in-game because of the excessive turtling thinking it’s helping; I don’t really care what you bring to Damnation so long as you use it.
I can count on hand the number of shieldgryns who used it offensively to move up and stagger-lock massive swaths of mixed hordes w/ bleed DR in the last couple of months.
It’s really quite simple, there have always been people who thought shield was bad and as general knowledge and the average skill level of players has increased that has become the dominant opinion. It’s just statistically a pretty terrible weapon, arguably the worst in the whole game. Its niche of blocking ranged fire just became less and less relevant as people got better at dealing with shooters on high difficulty.
Bringing it basically makes your team have to compensate a pretty massive loss in overall DPS. Ogryn can be an incredible valuable contributor with weapons like BB and Paul, in a vastly more impactful way than what shield brings. It also really doesn’t help that the average shield user truly is quite awful unfortunately. My experience with shieldgryn on Heresy and Damn is players with unnoticeable impact on killing, unless they try and circumvent this my spamming ranged, at which point they’re more of a Vetgryn than a shieldgryn, but even then they become a pretty massive ammo drain and the shield they brought still isn’t doing anything helpful there. To make matters worse shield is so slow and cumbersome shieldgryns often seem to die a lot. This seems to be a pretty widespread experience on Heresy and Damn. I don’t think I’ve seen any other topic as widely agreed upon across all class discords.
None of this is to condone people being an ass to PUGs about their weapon choice. If I have to deal with one I don’t bring it up and just strap myself in to pull as much weight as I possibly can. It really is just gimping what your Ogryn could be bringing to the team by a very noticeable margin. If you’re skilled enough to get by and be an asset to the team with shield it’s safe to say you have the skill to bring way way more to your team with a different loadout.
It was. Go back and read posts about the Ogryn pre-patch
I can’t speak for other forums but Ogryn Discord has thought shield is garbage for a pretty damn good while now.
Don’t know about discord since i don’t really go there. I tend to post/read here since it’s easier for the devs to notice/react given that this is the official forum. Anyhow, here’s a few posts in which either the OP or the replies discuss the shield at one point or another. And while opinions differ, the shield was never considered a weapon to be kicked out of a match for using. And even posts that SPECIFICALLY go against the shield don’t trash it, like it is being done these days.:
I think issue isn’t in weapon itself, it has great crowd control, issue is the game in it’s current state doesn’t require much of it.
It’s combination of what the thing offers and what gives best success.
Haha… yes, people used to believe that shield was the only viable choice, but even back than we were a lot who were trying to convince people that that was simply not true.
BB cleaver has always been the best choice imo, but shield has the lowest entry point for being useful and ranged enemies were the bane of all and toughness was broken to all hell at release, so the shield seemed like the best choice and the best way to go up in difficulty.
The Shield puts a lot of stress on the rest of the team, since they have to compensate for your lack of damage, which could end up with people getting killed or everything simply taking far longer than it has to.
And if you’re a player who’s used to being slightly carried by the rest of the team, then seeing a shield ogryn is going to look very scary since the Ogryn will visually be screaming “CARRY ME! PLEASE!” and they’ll know they won’t be able to cope with that, and it’s much easier to lash out/leave than to adapt.
So the shield isn’t trash and it isn’t useless… You just have to compensate for it’s weakness. A good way of doing this is having a powerful ranged weapon to combo with the Shield. Something like a Ripper or Kickback which helps with horde clear and can basically be used for the entire mission without needing the shield at all.
This sounds like a strawman argument or some misguided impression based on some “opinions” of people who struggle with Ogryn. Personally I never used the slab shield, my Ogryn is doing fine. Why would I use the maul with the shield?
Ain’t a strawman. It’s my genuine impression based on the majority people’s opinion on the forum and my personal experiences.
This post ain’t about trashing other Ogryn weapons, so it’s fine if you personally are doing well with other weapons. It’s me trying to understand the sudden hate for using a weapon that’s still perfectly viable, since what one can do with a cleaver can be done with a shield but not vice-versa.
From someone who used the shield from time to time just to play with it I would say the damage and horde clear is meh at best, a lot of people don’t use the thing to its full potential and end up just planting it out in the open with no plan on what to do next, the blessings on it are hot sweaty ass that do the thing no favours, and it’s big and hard for ranges characters to play around.
Damage wise it’s probably the worst of the Ogryn weapons. The heavy sweep on it has good cc but it’s extremely unlikely you are actually going to kill anything with it. You mostly end up throwing things around and making it annoying to kill anything because of how spread out things can get if you aren’t being careful with your sweeps. Against larger enemies it’s not even a contest, it’s just a bad time.
Used badly this thing is not just bad but an active detriment to the rest of your team. If seen one of the two personally. Either an ogryn plants basically out in the open, gets shot at a bunch, and then gets got by a trapper out of cover far enough away that the team can’t save them or they plant in the doorway when a room full of shooters is in the next room for a 2 way game of “you can’t snipe” for both the shooters and your team. I would say the shield works ok if you have a flamer zealot or if your team is mostly composed of psykers since they can shoot through teammates but other than that you are often in the way since you are the size of a large fridge. The thing is as bad as a bad iron breaker would be in VT2 you could at least see and shoot over them for the most part and see what was going on which unfortunately you don’t get for the Ogryn shield.
Then there are the blessings. Oh boy the blessings.
For starters there is only one blessing that actually gives you a solid damage bonus being skull crusher. Second BM seems like a joke since the chance of actually landing a weak spot hit with the slab shield seems very unlikely with the swing pattern. Perfect strike might be ok but i doubt the slab shield has a high base crit. Confident strike is ok, i guess, but it really doesn’t help why it needs it most. Nothing synergizes with either blocking or pushing and none of these besides skullcrusher really helps you horde clear any faster. Compare this to another popular impact weapon the brunt club.
It’s clear to see the difference in blessings and the impact they would have if the slab shield actually got good blessings. It’s also a real head scratcher why they didn’t include anything for shoving or +damage after a sucessful block / push or anything like that.
Slab shield does have it’s niche uses like making Daemon Hosts really easy or blocking damage from some boss type enemies but the detriments massively outweigh the benefits in a lot of cases.
As far as people changing their opinion on it people learned more about the game and saw how it was actually preforming in damnation, played around with it some more, went “oh this really doesn’t work so great” and moved on. On paper having pocket cover is really op but when the rest of your team is dead or dying that only takes you so far. People found either the bull butcher, the blunt, or the Power Maul a lot more useful and had far grater utility as far as the higher difficulties go.
Is it really sudden? I don’t know. It could be just slow news week and someone decided to bring this up. It could be that people realise there are better options for damnation runs, especially hi-intensity.
Cheers for the informative post, it’s well put together and it doesn’t boil down to “but I do much better with other weapons” type of answer that I’m too often seeing.
There are definitely things where the shield lags behind when compared to other weapons. And there are indeed certain behaviors which are not condusive to an “optimal” win, like shield users that turtle up for ages to come, which without a doubt, if done without reason, can become an hindrance.
But this is true with any class for one reason or another, they all have a weapon which is worse at something or is sub-optimal in a specific scenario. Yet I don’t see the palpable hate for those other classes/weapons that I see for the Ogryn shield.
The main thing that baffles me is when people completely sh*t on the shield. Which I don’t think you are doing btw. Since what other weapons can do so can the shield. Sure, you won’t kill a horde as fast as an Ogryn with a cleaver. But you can still easily kill a horde even with a shield. Sure it’s overall damage is inferior to the boosted power-maul or cleaver.
That means that what takes an Ogryn with a cleaver to kill in 6 hits, will only take 1 or 2 extra hits to kill with a shield, with the added benefit of having the thing you are hitting permanently on the floor due to the shield’s great stagger, which is always available unlike the power-maul, which requires charging.
This is without counting the things the shield can do that other Ogryn weapons can’t do. Like tanking shooters, tanking shotgunners, tanking gunners/reapers, tanking snipers that are aiming at you or an ally that is unable to shoot back (zealot with flamer ecc). You can also provide cover to your allies if you ever got stuck in an empty corridor flooded with shooters. You can also turn demonhosts into a joke and you can tank and stagger crushers/bulwarks with no problem.
Again, thanks for the well put response, i appreciate it.
What’s sudden to me is the hatred. It’s ok to dislike a weapon. It’s NOT ok to hate the player using it, to the point of insulting him or threatening him with a kick.
Especially when it’s still a perfectly viable weapon.
Those people are sperglord jerk offs but the shield does suck. Easily the worst weapon.
Let’s agree to disagree on the shield. But I’m glad we are on the same boat with the rest
tldr, its terrible. It has bad defense and awful offense.
Fun side note, the bully club has identical defense factors minus range block.
I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, but I have never seen a person being kicked or insulated in my games for not optimal weapon/build picks. Also I have no problem with people trying out unusual builds (except gun psyker, this is just pure heresy! j/k) or trying to challenge themselves with sub-optimal set ups. This is where half of the fun lies in this game.
Maybe you ran into some half-premade trying to farm some hi-intensity damnation runs?
I’ll just copy and paste what I said previously
TBH we had the same thing in Vermintide 1 and in 2 before the stagger rework when it came to shields. People absolutely despise their team for not running max dps all the time it seems in these co-op games.
